Hot answers tagged indulgence
7
Answering your question
No. It is not true. In any way.
The sale of indulgences is the sin of simony (selling of holy items) and the temporal punishment is the immediate excommunication of the perpetrator by the very nature of the act. Even accepting money for indulgences has been outlawed since the Council of Trent, which codified it with "let all who ...
5
I do not think Luther thought of them as being advertised as only good Christians would purchase them, or that people would show them off, definitely not thought of as a benign form of alms giving, but more along the lines of the last bullet points. The indulgences, in Luther’s mind, were simply taking advantage of people with a guilty conscience and ...
3
When the 95 Theses were first published, Luther actually supported the idea of indulgences:
#75. Let him be anathema and accursed who denies the apostolic character of the indulgences.
The problem was that
They were being "sold" (you had to donate to get one, actually selling them had been excommunicable for something like 100 years at that point)
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